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Obama’s Narrow Victory

By Ross Douthat October 17, 2012 2:18 amOctober 17, 2012 2:18 am

Just by showing up energized, by hemming and hawing less often and by going after Mitt Romney more directly, President Obama ensured himself a better showing than the disaster he endured in Denver two weeks ago. But the narrow win he gained in the second presidential debate also owed something to Romney’s performance, which, though highly effective in stretches, also showcased more of his flaws, both as a debater and as a candidate.

The first flaw was stylistic. Romney is very skillful at the onstage slash and parry, but he has weak spots, and veterans of the long Republican primary slog remember two of them particularly well. One is his tendency to argue pointlessly with the moderator and his opponents over the rules of order. The other is his habit of pressing his advantage too far, seeking a kind of alpha-male moment that can seem bullying instead of strong. (His attempt at a $10,000 bet with Rick Perry was the paradigmatic example.)

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Credit Mike Segar/Reuters

He gave in to both temptations this time around. The candidates each bickered with CNN’s Candy Crowley about turns and time allotments, but Romney went at it earlier and more often – sometimes justifiably, but never successfully. He also tried too hard to pre-empt the president’s increased aggression with aggression of his own, which doesn’t work well in a town-hall format, where the candidates are already circling one another like sharks. Invading your rival’s space can make you look hyped-up rather than presidential.

On substance, meanwhile, the studied vagueness of Romney’s domestic policy platform created more problems for him than it did in Denver. Two weeks ago, Obama seemed taken by surprise when Romney didn’t just debate like the far-right caricature from the White House’s campaign ads. This time the president was more prepared for his rival’s centrist-friendly defenses of his agenda, and more adept at pointing out the holes in them. And because Romney’s proposals really do have significant gaps, the Republican nominee was repeatedly thrown back on the promise that he “knows how to create jobs,” which is more a rhetorical crutch than a compelling argument.

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Where Romney actually has a more detailed proposal, as he does on immigration, his rebuttals were crisper and more convincing, and he also won several exchanges just by turning the conversation back to the economy’s performance under Obama. (He also had to deal with what the liberal pundit Jonathan Chait rightly described as a slate of “friendly questions from an audience that obviously leaned left.”) Nor was the president any better this time at answering the question haunting his candidacy: Why would your second term be any different?

Indeed, had the debate focused on the economy alone, Romney might have emerged more bruised than last time but still victorious. But there was also a segue into foreign policy, and there Romney showed real weakness, turning what should have been a major point-scoring opportunity on the Libya controversy into an ugly botch.

This botch looked worse because the moderator, Candy Crowley, jumped in inappropriately to fact-check Romney’s characterization of whether the president initially characterized the Benghazi incident as a terrorist attack – inappropriately because the president’s language was actually open to competing interpretations, and also because Romney’s broader point about the White House’s evasions was clearly correct and she seemed to be taking sides against him.

But Romney would have lost that exchange even without her intervention. He seemed at once underinformed and overaggressive, as he often does on foreign policy: He did a poor job of explaining what exactly the Obama White House had done wrong (he barely mentioned the administration’s fixation on the offensive YouTube video), seemed ill prepared for the president’s obvious, dudgeon-rich, I’m-the-commander-in-chief counterpunch, and then fell back on right-wing boilerplate about Obama’s supposed “apology tour” that can’t possibly resonate with swing voters.

Then again, it’s not clear that the Libya issue in particular, or foreign policy in general, really resonates with swing voters either. This is probably Romney’s best hope coming out of this debate: that he was weakest on style points and on issues that voters don’t particularly care about, and that by hammering away at the president’s record and projecting an air of economic competence he did himself more good than harm.

The snap polls, dubious though they may be, provide some support for this pro-Romney read on the night’s proceedings. CNN’s poll shows a modest Obama victory: 46 percent rated the president the winner versus 39 percent for Romney. But even in a debate that he lost over all, the poll still showed Romney edging the president on the crucial questions of who would better handle the economy, taxes and health care.

For Obama and his supporters, meanwhile, the hope has to be that Romney’s post-Denver bounce was just that: A temporary surge that could be blunted and reversed by simply reasserting the White House’s narrative – that Romney is an out-of-touch plutocrat and ideological extremist, whereas Obama is a champion of the middle class – much more effectively and eloquently than the president did in the first debate.

The question now is whether that kind of straightforward reassertion is all Obama needed, or whether the public’s post-Denver willingness to consider Romney anew shifted the dynamics of the race in a way that a closely fought debate can’t quite reverse. That’s something that no snap survey can tell us. The proof will be in the polls a week from now.

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Weekly pieces by the Op-Ed columnists Charles Blow and Ross Douthat, as well as regular posts from contributing writers like Thomas B. Edsall and Timothy Egan. This is also the place for opinionated political thinkers from all over the United States to make their arguments about everything connected to the 2012 election. Yes, everything: the candidates, the states, the caucuses, the issues, the rules, the controversies, the primaries, the ads, the electorate, the present, the past and even the future.